We consider the problem of finding the smallest or largest entry of a tensor of order N that is specified via its rank decomposition. Stated in a different way, we are given N sets of R-dimensional vectors and we wish to select one vector from each set such that the sum of the Hadamard product of the selected vectors is minimized or maximized. We show that this fundamental tensor problem is NP-hard for any tensor rank higher than one, and polynomial-time solvable in the rank-one case. We also propose a continuous relaxation and prove that it is tight for any rank. For low-enough ranks, the proposed continuous reformulation is amenable to low-complexity gradient-based optimization, and we propose a suite of gradient-based optimization algorithms drawing from projected gradient descent, Frank-Wolfe, or explicit parametrization of the relaxed constraints. We also show that our core results remain valid no matter what kind of polyadic tensor model is used to represent the tensor of interest, including Tucker, HOSVD/MLSVD, tensor train, or tensor ring. Next, we consider the class of problems that can be posed as special instances of the problem of interest. We show that this class includes the partition problem (and thus all NP-complete problems via polynomial-time transformation), integer least squares, integer linear programming, integer quadratic programming, sign retrieval (a special kind of mixed integer programming / restricted version of phase retrieval), and maximum likelihood decoding of parity check codes. We demonstrate promising experimental results on a number of hard problems, including state-of-art performance in decoding low density parity check codes and general parity check codes.